Mississippi voters decide today if a woman's fertilized egg is a 'person'

IBD Editorials ^ | November 8, 2011 | Andrew Malcom Political News & Commentary

[Kaslin]

Here's a not-so-little something to keep your eyes on this evening when election returns start coming in from around the country.

Much attention will likely be focused on Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich's government reprioritizing is under initiaitve attack and, according to latest polls, in serious danger of being tossed.

But watch for results from Mississippi on something called Initiative 26 or MS 26.

That's the so-called "personhood" measure. If passed, it would define a woman's fertilized egg as a person, which would have the likely effect of completely banning abortions without the specific ban on abortions that has encountered trouble in courts.

[Las Vegas Ron]

Yes!!

Cell division (inception) is the quintessential definition of LIFE!

[Las Vegas Ron]

Life ping!

[surroundedbyblue]

I hope Mississippi citizens have the courage to defend the unborn.

[GeronL]

great idea with a sound foundation in science

[gaijin]

I’m not terribly religious, but developmentally speaking after the 7th or so day of conception the tissues have fully differentiated and on a 1-cell basis cannot be distinguised from the cells of a 90-year-old.

They’re only completely plastic up until maybe the 4th day following conception.

The more imaging tech progresses the more obvious this will be to all.

When you talk to embryologists they’re so used to thinking of it as an organism that the fact that it’s INSIDE of another organism is almost like some kind of afterthought —it’s like, “So what...?” It’s like instead of the organism being in, say, Nevada, or Maine, it’s....INSIDE of mommy.

[Black Agnes]

Based on conversations standing in the line to vote, this is going down in flames.

Sorry.

The ‘vote no on 26’ put out an effective mailer that arrived in everyone’s mailbox yesterday insinuating this initiative would outlaw all birth control. And IVF and other reproductive services.

For the record, I voted yes.

[surroundedbyblue]

Then your conscience is clear. It’s a shame that the moral relativists will allow the abortion mills to hum along so they can continue their lives of convienience.

[PieterCasparzen]

Anyone aware of basic high school level biology (or even those who have blind faith in human scientific knowledge though they have none themselves) can easily inform the voters that the first cell of human procreation, the zygote, which results from fertilization, has DNA that is unique amongst all persons and different from both that of the father - and the mother in whose womb the developing child finds sustenance and protection. From the moment of fertilization there is a body inside the mother’s body which is most certainly not her body, as it has different DNA. In fact, were it not for the elegant designs of God’s creation, the mother’s immune system would, in fact, attack the developing child and purge it from her body, since it is a foreign body inside of her body.

This is very commonly known stuff, it’s just never mentioned by liberals, and if anyone else mentions it they are villified, painted as a idiot for “not understanding science”, etc.

[Theodore R.]

“Very commonly known stuff” has little validity with the American people, as we may see again tonight.

[Theodore R.]

Yes, I do too, but I am never optimistic when it comes to the American people making choices.

[Strategerist]

In fact, were it not for the elegant designs of God’s creation, the mother’s immune system would, in fact, attack the developing child and purge it from her body, since it is a foreign body inside of her body.

So why is an elegant design of God's creation miscarrying a quarter of the time?

[PieterCasparzen]

It is amazing how low we’ve sunk.

“Sir, Ma’am, you should not kill your own children. It’s not our children you’re killing, it’s your own children. They have their own DNA - it’s not the mother’s body - it’s her unborn child. Her own child. If you stop to think about it, it’s a vile practice.”

“You crazy man - you wanna make it so we cain’t be havin’ sex unless we’re makin’ babies. Yer ignernt.”

“Yeh, mista. Yooz iz ignant a’ science an’ aw dat loinin’ stuff.”

“Well, they’re YOUR babies. Do you want to kill them just so you can have sex ? Is sex more important than your child being gruesomely murdered ?”

[Strategerist]

Nobody ACTUALLY could ever bring themselves to consider a fertilized egg a person, though they can obviously do it theoretically (and as long as it’s someone else’s fertilized egg.)

For example, any woman supporting Personhood that is sexually active that isn’t having every...well, drop of “fluid” carefully examined by a team of scientists for the POSSIBILITY of a spontaneously aborted embryo (before a pregnancy is detected), so that a funeral can be held, is a hypocrite.

Based on a previous thread where someone asserted that in fact every miscarriage SHOULD be investigated as a potential murder, actually, under Personhood,there is a clear governmental mandate to collect ALL vaginal infusions of ALL women to inspect them for embryos, and conduct an investigation to rule out the possibility that the miscarriage wasn’t natural.

Probably some government functionary stopping by every house with a post-puberty, pre-menopause female EVERY day (to collect the government-provided vaginal effusions themos) will work. Of course, you’d also need carefully vetted governmental databases of exactly what girls have gone through puberty and when, and some sort of certificate issued to women who can prove they’ve gone through menopause so that they no longer are subject to inspection and investigation.

[AuH2ORepublican]

I saw county results a few minutes ago, and No was winning with 58% in über-Republican Rankin County, and had 65% in Harrison County on the Gulf. Yes appeared to be winning only in northern Mississippi (it had 57% in Tupelo’s Lee County).

I am extremely disappointed.

[PieterCasparzen]

In fact, were it not for the elegant designs of God’s creation, the mother’s immune system would, in fact, attack the developing child and purge it from her body, since it is a foreign body inside of her body.

So why is an elegant design of God's creation miscarrying a quarter of the time?

Please direct your sarcasm at me and not God, for your sake.

If you don't see the elegance in the design of living organisms all I can suggest is to study them in detail and then compare them to the best of what humans have designed in all of human history.

There is far more that humanity does not understand than it does understand.

[Graybeard58]

So why is an elegant design of God's creation miscarrying a quarter of the time?

Are you "pro choice"? A simple yes or no will do.

[annie laurie]

Beautiful post, thank you!

[PieterCasparzen]

Nobody ACTUALLY could ever bring themselves to consider a fertilized egg a person, though they can obviously do it theoretically (and as long as it’s someone else’s fertilized egg.)

Married couples typically feel a great deal of sorrow when the wife miscarries. I've never directly experienced that, but I think most would agree that it can be a traumatic event. If they did not consider the unborn child their child but some tissue in the mother's body there would be no sadness.

If parents do not consider that the wife is carrying their child from the moment they find out she is pregnant but they think that she is only after she gets close to delivery - they think that only because that is what so much of society has been believing and teaching in earnest since the 1960's.

For example, any woman supporting Personhood...

The rest of your comments following are an exaggeration meant to illustrate that since early miscarriages are not uncommon then abortion is acceptable, since monitoring for every early miscarriage would be impractical, but seemingly logically required to be sure that there was no murder.

The response is quite simple. Early miscarriages which happen naturally are a natural death, of course, not murder. For a mother to cause this herself in an effort to murder her own child, there would be some serious problems somewhere in the family situation. And self-induced miscarriages are, accordingly, quite rare and difficult to detect and prove. The law and law enforcement can never eliminate all deaths of unborn children - as it can never eliminate all murders of even those who have been born. The police can't be everywhere all the time and they certainly can't camp out inside people's homes.

All this exaggeration of certifying and checking every woman in the nation has nothing to do with simply not having abortions be a legal medical procedure. Such laws would be enforced in a manner similar to how doctors are presently regulated. There are other procedures that are illegal: illegal harvesting of body parts, for example. Of course, having the law on the books does not prevent some crackpot doctor from breaking the law: doctors here and there get arrested for malpractice and wind up on the news and typically in jail.

Laws are never adopted to eliminate something undesired or force something that is desired in such a manner as to be 100% effective. Laws are only adopted so as to provide a standard by which citizens can be judged of what they are accused, and, if convicted, then punished for what they are convicted of. This punishment is the rod that deters those in society who would hurt others. There is no guarantee of perfect justice but that does not mean that having no laws or system of justice would be preferable; of course, with no deterrants, society would operate under the "law of the jungle", a state of increased misery.

Most people think that killing the baby in the womb immediately before birth is murder, as it's obviously disingenuous to suggest that a minute after birth is murder but a minute before is not. Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his unborn son as well as his wife under California's pre-existing fetal homicide law. Of course, the SCOTUS focused on "viability" of the "fetus" in the Row v. Wade case. But this was really a political position aimed at providing a half-satisfying stance for those on both sides of the issue, since it neatly avoids the truth that if the child is not killed by the person performing the abortion, it would be carried to term and live, unless the unborn child were to die before birth naturally. In that case, of course, it's a natural death and not an abortion.

It's very understandable that people who find nothing wrong with sex outside the bonds of marriage desire to preserve their option to keep the practice socially acceptable. Sex is a recreational activity for them that they do not want to give up on - possibly many actually believe that there's no way they can if they wanted to. Contrary to what we think today however, it is possible for humans live with a much reduced rate of extra-marital sex; since there were many times in history when that was the case. Again, it can not be eliminated completely through laws and complete elimination is therefore not the goal.

In order to put that whole idea into perspective, we need to study social mores prior to WWII - and going back for thousands of years before that. During that whole time, sex as recreation was not typically seen as a societal goal, socially acceptable, or something that parents should encourage or even tolerate in their children. The whole basis of such laws and societal framework that was institutionally in place during most of history was that the family was the basic unit of societal responsibility and that allowing young umarried men to impregnate young ummarried women made life very difficult. It still does make life difficult, but since the young people of the 1960's "sexual revolution" are now the most influential age group in society, part of the Zeitgeist reflects the logical endpoint of that rejection of time-honored rules. It seems that we are bombarded by things promoting sex 24 hours a day.

The lack of parent's authority over their own children, children enganging in sexual acts formerly socially acceptable only by adults, adults forgoing the familial responsibilities of marriage, living in that sense in a state that would have always been considered childlike, all serve to create families with fragmented, unbalanced and weak lines of responsibility and authority. As W. Edwards Demming taught, authority and responsibility must be delegated in equal proportion for effective results. As mankind has known for time immemorial, children raised with weak or absent parental authority are done a grave disservice.

So America is just beginning to reap the "benefits" of what was sown in the 1960's.

IMHO.